The platform continues to evolve as demonstrated at Facebook's annual developer conference. F8 in April 2017, with annou
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Leveraging Facebook for Successful Communications in Pharmaceutical Marketing
Table of Contents
Facebook Health..................................................................................................3 harma-specific P Promotional Offerings........................................................................................4 hat’s Next for W Facebook’s Products?..........................................................................................6 It’s More Than a Media & Tech Platform........................................................................................................7 Privacy and Promotion.......................................................................................8 Summary............................................................................................................. 10 References.......................................................................................................... 11 About ghg | greyhealth group ...................................................................... 12
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Facebook Health
Facebook is indisputably a huge leader in the technology, publishing, and advertising space, with a wealth of opportunities for engagement and promotion available for companies and brands alike. However, apart from a few front-runners, Pharma marketers have historically not leveraged Facebook for drug promotion or patient community development. In taking a look back over the past few years, the reason why is twofold. First, and not surprisingly, Pharma brands are concerned about getting in trouble with regulators by not conforming to safety requirements, and they are put off by the time and costs associated with real-time monitoring of potential adverse events. And, at the time of writing, the most recent (draft) guidance from the FDA on the use of social media is from 2014, with no concrete rules defined.1 Second, Facebook has historically been against giving any special treatment to particular industries, citing the need to keep the social aspect of Facebook just that: social. By allowing disabling of comments, moderation of content, and different experiences for Pharma, it would be moving away from that model and entering a world beyond the platform’s core intentions.
At the end of 2015, to more closely partner with Pharma, Facebook launched the Facebook Health division—a team dedicated to working with Pharma companies and their agencies. Since then, the team has worked closely with policy, marketing, and product teams to develop solutions for Pharma on the platform. Facebook also held its first Health Summit at its NYC HQ on June 6, 2017; the event was attended by Pharma (regulated and OTC) and agency teams. The focus was on mobile (something that Facebook is strongly pursuing, as the majority of traffic and engagement occurs on mobile devices), but also provided information, insights, and reassurance about its products and commitment to mobile video.4 Following this event, Facebook established a presence at Cannes Lions Health, where Facebook’s Meredith Guerriero, an ex-Googler, joined the stage with Allergan’s US Director of Marketing to discuss the Pharma digital marketing landscape.
However, in 2015, Pharma spent more than $5.2 billion in traditional advertising alone,2 with hundreds of millions more in digital and social-media advertising. Of course, that is a huge volume of ad spend, and Facebook wants a piece of that pie to compete with the other digital media leaders, such as Google, as well as to continue its growth trajectory. On the flip side, Pharma marketers want to be able to leverage the wealth of demographic, interest, and location data available to message the 2 billion monthly global Facebook users.3 In the US alone, an average of 195 million people visit Facebook on a mobile device each month; of these people, 1 in 4 is looking for health information.4 In addition, there are currently 70 million people active in Facebook health groups, and so it is the perfect time for Pharma brands to engage with them in a new way.4
So, with all of Facebook’s efforts at educating Pharma marketers on the platform and providing unique products, is it working? The short answer is, yes. A recent report by Cutting Edge Information shows that 73% of pharmaceutical marketing teams plan to use Facebook within the next 2 years.5 It is, therefore, imperative that agencies ensure that brands (and their legal teams) understand the offerings available, how they are compliant with FDA and corporate regulations, and why the channel is invaluable as part of a larger digital strategy to meet both branded and unbranded imperatives.
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Pharma-specific Promotional Offerings
Since the launch of the Facebook Health division, Facebook has indeed delivered on its promise of creating pharma-specific products and offerings, and many manufacturers and brands have already taken advantage. Probably the most widely publicized product developed with the Facebook Health division was the scrolling Important Safety Information (ISI) unit as a Facebook News Feed ad. Announced at Digital Pharma East in October 2016, Bayer launched the first scrolling ISI Facebook News Feed ad for its Betaseron MS drug and Betaconnect autoinjector; this was also the first Facebook ad from Bayer.6 You may say that this is hardly a novel approach (after all, banner ads with scrolling ISI have been running for years), but given the restrictions within the Facebook ad environment (ie, no custom HTML for News Feed ads), this is a good example of how Facebook is partnering with Pharma and developing
solutions that comply with FDA regulations within the available technology: ISI served within a video. This now allows Pharma to take advantage of all the main types of ads within the News Feed driving to websites, app downloads, and the multitude of other calls to action available from Facebook. Facebook does still require advertisers to have a Facebook page in order to run ads within the News Feed—something that has often left Pharma ads relegated to the right rail, and, therefore, not visible on mobile. But don’t worry, Facebook has a solution for that as well. See below for more detail on this and other Pharma Facebook solutions.
Pharma Pages Facebook now has specific templates that provide more flexibility for Pharma brands. First, by setting the page to a particular category, certain features become available. These features include a dedicated area for ISI on the Home page and About page, greater control over posts for images or videos of the safety information to be pinned to the top of the feed, and greater control over the page tabs. The ability still remains for custom tabs to be added to further include PI or ISI, as required in HTML. Facebook will also whitelist the page upon request and, after review, disable comments and reactions on content. This lessens the burden on Pharma companies to monitor conversations, although it does detract from the social nature of Facebook. The disabling of comments also pulls through to any ad run in the News Feed that is tied to the whitelisted account.
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Pharma-specific Promotional Offerings
Click-to-Call Ads7 In 2015, Facebook introduced this feature designed for local business ads. This type of ad includes a call to action that calls a number directly from the ad itself. Such ads offer a unique opportunity for Pharma to connect patients with live nurses or educators. In addition to the scrolling ISI in the ads, Betaseron included this Call Now feature to connect users to a live nurse-staffed hotline.6
Lead Ads8 Facebook lead ads were also introduced in 2015, and these allow data that are publicly available in a user’s Facebook profile to be automatically entered into forms to ease an enrollment process. In Pharma, these could be used to enroll patients in support or savings card programs. CHANTIX uses this type of ad unit to provide savings cards to users via SMS.
Closed Groups Groups and closed groups were once a staple of Facebook (there are more than 6 million health-related groups). Recently, they’ve lost some of their appeal, but Facebook still retains support for them. Different from a page, groups allow for communities to be developed around particular topic areas, and by implementing a closed group, brands can control who is allowed access (something not available to pages). One example of this is Colgate’s group for registered dental hygienists.
Live9 Facebook Live allows live video to be streamed to all followers of a particular person or page, and people are able to ask questions, react, and engage with the content. After the stream, the video is viewable similar to any other video asset. In many other industries, it’s used to share content from events (something Apple did very successfully at this year’s Worldwide Developer Conference, driving enormous engagement). In the Pharma arena, this could be used to share KOL interviews with followers, or to share industry theaters at conventions.
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What’s Next for Facebook’s Products?
Over the past year or so, Facebook has evolved its service offerings and products to court laggard industries and to capitalize on the tremendous impact video is making. The platform continues to evolve as demonstrated at Facebook’s annual developer conference F8 in April 2017, with announcements about chatbots, AI, VR, and other emerging technologies10 that are immediately making an impact in the Pharma industry. Facebook was early to the VR party with its acquisition of Oculus in 201411; however, until recently, it wasn’t clear where it planned to take that investment within its overall offerings. In 2016, GSK partnered with Facebook’s Oculus division to create the Excedrin Migraine Experience to allow non–migraine sufferers to experience the full symptoms of migraines.12 This experience was also rolled out onto a mobile application—a great example of how VR can be used in the health arena. However, it wasn’t directly tied to the Facebook platform. At F8, Mark Zuckerberg announced the launch of Spaces, Facebook’s multiuser VR playground.13 This enables users to connect with friends in virtual reality by logging in with their Facebook account and interacting with an avatar. Opportunities for Pharma could include virtual patient communities, particularly in diseases such as cystic fibrosis, where sufferers are encouraged not to be in close proximity to each other. At F8 in 2016, Mark Zuckerberg announced the integration of chatbots into its Messenger platform.14 At F8 in 2017, just 1 year since the initial announcement, Facebook announced that it had reached 100,000 bots—quite an astounding expansion in just 1 year.15 In addition to this announcement, it provided enhanced third-party integrations, the ability to use bots
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in group chats, and the “Discovery” tab within Messenger, which allows users to search for bots.16 Some healthcare bots have already been created for the platform, such as HealthTap’s bot, which allows consumers to get answers to health-related questions from physicians, or Oscar’s bot, which helps consumers get health insurance quotes and information. They’re also currently in closed beta for enabling Messenger bots to be embedded in business websites. According to Sensely, virtual triage through AI-powered solutions such as chatbots can help reduce nurse time by up to 20% by avoiding unnecessary calls.17 When it comes to Pharma brands, opportunities exist to help patients enroll in patient support programs, easily and more effectively answer drug or disease FAQs, and generally enhance adherence by enabling greater access to information, such as dosing and side-effect details. Finally, Facebook recently announced Watch, a new tab that will house original content produced by Facebook partners.18 It is clear that Facebook has been doubling down on social video for some time, but this is a clear push to rival YouTube in terms of social video programming and ad revenue. It initially launched only to select users with a small set of content and now is available to all users. This functionality brings a community element to watching video, something that could be very powerful in the Pharma and healthcare realm. Consider a way to connect community physicians with KOLs, or patients with advocates or nurse educators in a new, compelling way.
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It’s More Than a Media & Tech Platform
Many of the elements outlined in the previous pages focus on Facebook’s role in advertising, media, and/ or technology. While this is great for healthcare and Pharma to increasingly take advantage of Pharma-friendly promotional offerings, there are other ways Facebook benefits the healthcare industry. First of all, there is the aspect of health communities. According to Facebook, there are over 10 million health support groups on the platform, covering everything from health and wellness, mental health, and diabetes to very niche groups run by patients.4 Take these examples in psoriasis, for instance: A psoriasis patient created and maintains several properties focused on the support of patients with psoriasis (PsoWhat), and even one to support patients on a specific therapy (Cosentyx). These have no affiliation to any companies or brands per se, but they show the power that community has to enable self-advocation of better health by patients. Additionally, they are great examples of how elements created by brands can be used by patients to foster ongoing support outside of the branded realm. Pharma brands do play a role in this space as well. One great example of this is Gilenya’s Facebook community for MS patients—a community with over 295,000 likes. It has long been cited as one of the forerunners in pushing the boundaries of how Pharma uses Facebook to support patients, and it leverages real patients called “Gilenya Guides” to share information about the product and hints and tips about living with MS. In 2016, Gilenya took advantage of the ability to disable comments on the page, and had built a Facebook application that allowed moderated conversation within the community (likely to make managing AE monitoring and reporting easier). However, at the beginning of 2017, Gilenya did away with the moderated application and opened up the page to allow
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comments, and each post garners great interaction with the community. There is little need for intervention by the community manager, but the community manager is on hand to answer questions and respond to comments as appropriate. The other way Facebook can support healthcare and Pharma is in clinical trial recruiting. Historically, identifying and recruiting the right patient to ensure the trial is successful is something that is very difficult to do efficiently and effectively. However, with Facebook’s wealth of demographic-, community-, and interest-based targeting, along with custom audience, look-alike capabilities, and easy optimization tools, this is now something that could be done much more easily. In fact, on September 7, 2017, Facebook’s Health team held a summit titled “Clinical Trials Strategy,” which focused on sharing how Facebook’s products can be leveraged to recruit patients.19 But companies have already been using Facebook for this purpose. Facebook has been used to recruit patients in the cardiology, diabetes, and oncology spaces with great success. Using Facebook to specifically target the investigator site markets—leveraging demographic and interest-based targeting—trials have seen great engagement, with recruitment ads leading to huge increases in recruitment and referral volume and ultimately large reductions in cost per recruit. This could be particularly important in trials in rare disease or small categories that don’t have adequate funding to reach the right patient types and be successful. As you can see, Facebook’s potential goes far beyond advertising and technology, and can be used effectively to help improve overall health outcomes.
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Privacy and Promotion
Recent elections in the United States and United Kingdom have put advertising transparency and privacy issues at the front of the news—and Facebook has often been at the center of that discussion. Privacy has always been something of a concern to pharmaceutical marketers’ LMR teams (especially on social media). Late in 2017, Facebook announced that they were rolling out measures to provide additional transparency around advertisements.20 Some of these measures may have an impact to pharmaceutical marketers. The “Why am I seeing this?” or “About this article” Button20
• In an effort to improve advertising transparency, Facebook is currently testing a solution where users can view the promoted content being served by a particular brand by clicking the “View Ads” link on the brand page. This is currently being tested in Canada and expected to roll out in the US before the November 2018 midterms.
•E ach ad running in the News Feed now allows users to click a button to see who is sponsoring the ad and the targeting criteria being used to serve the ad to users; they are also able to opt out of future ads by that sponsor and manage their general preferences. •U sers can also learn more about publishers who share articles or news-related content. This content is pulled by Facebook and is not necessarily controllable by the brand, so it may be a concern for LMR teams if brand names and information are shown out of context with respect to other components on a page. “View Ads” Feature21 •F acebook allows “unpublished” page posts—promoted content that does not appear on the brand’s page. This allows for segmenting ads to particular user groups, or running A/B tests for content.
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Additional Enforcement •W hile pharmaceutical ads are already under greater scrutiny (for example, advertisers can’t include ad copy that suggests they know a user has a particular health condition), all ads are now being reviewed more closely to ensure they remain compliant with Facebook’s policies.
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Privacy and Promotion
At the beginning of 2018, Mark Zuckerberg announced a change in how content will be displayed in the News Feed, with a greater focus on content from friends and family and content that is more likely to drive engagement rather than passive consumption.22
Overall, these changes are designed to drive a better experience for users, but, of course, they may have implications for brands, as page posts may be pushed lower in the News Feed. A particular consideration for Pharma brands are pages that are whitelisted, with comments disabled. It is likely that these organic page posts are going to see less distribution given the lack of ability for a user to interact with them. However, users will still be allowed to manage preferences regarding which pages they want to see in their News Feed.22 On January 19, Facebook announced an update to its upcoming changes, citing a focus on 3 areas of prioritization for content23: •N ews from publications that the community rates as trustworthy • News that people find informative
These changes are meant to drive more trustworthy content and less clutter in the News Feed, encourage brands to focus on high-quality content that promotes interaction, and result in a more engaged user base on Facebook. It is also unlikely that these changes are going to affect promoted posts that are a core part of many brands’ Facebook strategy—after all, breaking through with organic content has always been a challenge, especially in Pharma. Ultimately, it does warrant a discussion with brand and LMR teams about dialing up the amount of organic video content, and potentially revisiting the strategy for pages that are just used for serving ads and those pages with comments disabled. It is likely that content posted from open pages may have an advantage moving forward in this new model.
•N ews that is relevant to people’s local community
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Summary
It is clear that there are numerous opportunities within Facebook for healthcare as a whole, and these opportunities will continue to grow. Many of Facebook’s technologies outlined in this piece are still in their infancy, but the potential opportunities for pharma and healthcare are certainly evident. We’re constantly monitoring the latest updates and are always in contact with Facebook to see how it can best be included as part of a social strategy for specific brands. Interested to see how a Facebook and social strategy can transform your brand? Get in touch. Chris Millsom VP, Digital Strategy Director ghg | greyhealth group
[email protected] @chrismillsom
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References
1. h ttps://www.fda.gov/downloads/Drugs/GuidanceComplianceRegulatoryInformation/GuidancesUCM401087.pdf 2. https://www.statnews.com/2016/03/09/drug-industry-advertising/ 3. https://www.statista.com/statistics/264810/number-of-monthly-active-facebook-users-worldwide/ 4. Facebook Health Summit 2017, June 6, 2017 5. http://www.marketwired.com/press-release/the-most-popular-social-media-platforms-inthephamaindustry-for-2017-2018-2229634.htm 6. http://www.fiercepharma.com/marketing/bayer-s-first-facebook-ad-campaign-features-firstscrolingisi-a-pharma-ad-facebook-ad 7. https://www.facebook.com/business/a/local-awareness-call-now 8. https://www.facebook.com/business/a/facebook-lead-ads-info 9. https://live.fb.com/ 10. https://www.fbf8.com/watch 11. https://www.facebook.com/zuck/posts/10101319050523971 12. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SmJW8gYIN4E 13. https://www.wired.com/2017/04/facebook-spaces-vr-for-your-friends/ 14. https://techcrunch.com/2016/04/12/agents-on-messenger/ 15. https://venturebeat.com/2017/04/18/facebook-messenger-hits-100000-bots/ 16. https://techcrunch.com/2017/04/18/facebook-bot-discovery/ 17. http://sensely.com/ 18. https://techcrunch.com/2017/08/09/facebook-watch/ 19. h ttps://www.cnbc.com/2017/09/07/facebook-held-a-breakfast-to-promote-clinical-trials-strategyhtml 20. https://newsroom.fb.com/news/2017/10/improving-enforcement-and-transparency/ 21. https://newsroom.fb.com/news/2017/10/update-on-our-advertising-transparency-and-authenticity-eforts/ 22. https://newsroom.fb.com/news/2018/01/news-feed-fyi-bringing-people-closer-together/ 23. https://newsroom.fb.com/news/2018/01/trusted-sources/ All sites accessed January 24, 2018. Information is accurate as of the time of writing.
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About ghg | greyhealth group
ghg | greyhealth group is a 30-year-old, full-service, global health and wellness communications network with the heart and soul of a start-up. Every day we couple our vast experience with unyielding curiosity and passion to create award-winning, multichannel launch campaigns, differentiated branding and strategic positioning, innovative medical education, healthcare-access programs, cutting-edge digital, and scientific and value-based communications. ghg is a wholly owned member of WPP Health & Wellness (wpphealth.com), a leading subholding company created to mobilize and focus WPP’s (NASDAQ: WPPGY) vast resources for the benefit of clients across the full spectrum of health. www.ghgroup.com
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